Tue
14
Feb 2023
I usually write technical blog posts to educate readers on specific topics. However, this time, I wanted to share something more personal - my experience after participating in the Global Game Jam 2023. The event took place from February 3 to 5, 2023, but only now did I find the time to write this post, as I spent a week in Munich attending the Vulkanised conference right after GGJ.
For those unfamiliar with the Global Game Jam, it's a worldwide event where participants come together to create games for fun. Unlike Ludum Dare, GGJ is not just an online/remote event. It's an opportunity to spend the weekend in person at one of many sites around the world and develop a game based on a specific, globally-announced theme within the constrained time limit. In Poland alone, there were eight sites organized in major cities. I attended PolyJam 2023 (GGJ entry, FB event), which was organized by Koło Naukowe Twórców Gier Polygon, a game development interest group at Warsaw University of Technology that I still regularly attend even though I'm no longer a student.
The theme announced for this year’s GGJ was “roots”. A theme is something that games made during the jam should be related to, or at least be inspired by. But the theme can be interpreted freely. Roots of trees and other plants are the first association that comes to mind and that most teams followed (including us), but others are also possible, e.g. a heritage like genes or culture inherited from parents and ancestors, something about indigenous people, or even… calculating mathematical square root.
Our jam site was large and well organized. KNTG Polygon has long experience in organizing such events, after many years of doing local site of GGJ, as well as their custom Slavic Game Jam. Thanks to the work of volunteers and money from sponsors, a very low entry fee ensured not only space, access to the power and Internet but also unlimited coffee, other drinks, sweets, and full catering. GGJ website says there were 124 jammers registered on the site. Although GGJ as a whole isn’t a competition, there are no winners or prizes, our local site featured a competition.
When competitions are made on game jams, there are 2 general ways of doing them:
If a team wants to win, they should take different approaches depending on this. In option 1, the game is played only by the authors, so it is enough to prepare a good-looking show for a couple of minutes. However, they need to think beforehand about what to say and how to play their game to impress people. Option 2 is essentially like preparing a booth on a gaming expo – all about attracting people, showing and explaining the game to them, and making sure the build works fine and looks playable during these few minutes when other people play it. PolyJam 2023 went for option 1. Every team had 3 minutes to present their game on stage. There were over 40 different teams, but the presentation was well organized and went smoothly.
Back to my presence there… I didn’t take part in a game jam for 2 years, since before COVID. I wanted to go there to check if I still remember how to program :) Of course I work with code in my everyday job, but quickly hacking a game jam game, which is essentially like a prototype, is something different from writing production-quality code at work. The small 2D game we made is: Roots of Life and Death. Our team was 3 people: Michał Rudnicki “Mildanach” as graphics artist, Bartek Dramczyk “Voyager” who made music and sound effects, and myself as the programmer. We’ve developed everything on a public GitHub repository. I also hosted web version of the game that can be played online. The game is about resource management – by creating new nodes (left mouse button click) and transferring resources between them (left mouse button drag&drop), player can expand the system of underground roots, create new flowers to gather more sun at the top of the map and acquire more water at the bottom. Enemy plant is playing on the other side of the screen according to the same rules, controlled by the AI.
I know the game is not finished, not very dynamic or enjoyable. What is important to me is the way we made it. In past game jams I used different technologies, ranging from a custom engine in C++, Cocos2d-x library, to Unity and Unreal Engine, which are the most popular these days. I must admit I don’t know Unity or UE too well – not as much as I wish I knew, but for this year’s GGJ I decided to try something new: I used Cocos Creator. This is a Chinese game engine that looks somewhat similarly to Unity, provides a convenient editor, features a component-based scene graph, and supports all an indie game may need (2D and 3D graphics, collisions and physics simulation, UI, sound, etc.).
The programming language used in it is TypeScript. I didn’t know either Cocos Creator or TypeScript before. Having only basic knowledge of JavaScript, I started learning them 2 weeks before the jam. I enjoyed it a lot. It is long time since I learned a new programming language, while it is always a very mind-expanding experience. I like the way TypeScript introduces strong typing into JavaScript, which is by nature a very dynamic scripting language. For example, let a: string|number;
defines a variable which can contain either string or numeric values, while let eventType: 'mouseDown'|'mouseUp';
defines a variable that can hold only a string with one of these two specific values. I was learning just from a first TypeScript tutorial I found on the Internet and the official TypeScript cheat sheets.
With our game, we didn’t win the competition at our site and we were far from winning, but this wasn’t the point. I am still happy about our performance. Things that went well:
What went wrong:
Overall, participation in Global Game Jam was a fun experience. I can recommend it to everyone who likes games and feels a need to do something creative. There is no need to have a team beforehand. Some people just come and team up with freshly meet people, some make their games alone as a 1-person team. I even met some people who came but didn’t plan to make any game! They just wanted to spend this time among nice, like-minded people and do something creative, e.g. to draw new things to their personal portfolio.
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